The Tree of Life

Just saw the trailer for Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life, and I must say I'm pretty stoked.  I come into it a little biased since I hold his previous film The Thin Red Line above all others.  Yes, it is my favorite movie, and yes, it even surpasses The Goonies ;) (Although that movie wins the most viewed award for me).  I know for many people, his film The Thin Red Line was a failure.  Maybe what was most unfortunate was that it was released the same year as the hugely popular Saving Private Ryan, and though both films are about WWII, they couldn't be more different.   I guess I could try and explain how The Thin Red Line was much more than a war film, how it was a film about the human experience that used WWII as a backdrop to try and explain the underlying truths of  human nature.  But in reality my description would come up short because Terrence Malick is the only one that really could describe his vision.  And even then, the movie can mean something very specific to Malick, yet say something completely different to a viewer.

But regardless of what the movie was supposed to be saying, it has always spoken to me. The singing of the aboriginal peoples, the score of Hans Zimmer, the cadence of the nature images, and the raw emotion from the characters have all worked for me at a level so much deeper than any other film I have ever watched. Ebert describes this sort of feeling we can experience while watching a film as "Elevation."  He writes about it here.  He explains that for years when people asked him "how do you know a movie is great?"  He always replied "I feel a tingling in my spine.  People look at me blankly.  I explain that I feel an actual physical sensation that does not depend on the abstract quality of the movie, but on--well, my visceral feelings."  That's exactly right. The movies I hold higher than all others, are the ones that literally make my spine tingle.  And The Thin Red Line does this for me more than any other.  Ebert goes on to say "I have observed before that we live in a box of space and time, and movies can open a window in the box. One human life, closely observed, is everyone's life.  In the particular is the universal.  Empathy is the feeling that most makes us human.  Elevation may be the emotion caused when we see people giving themselves up, if only for a moment, to caring about others."

Just think about the movies that have really stuck with you.  I bet those films have brought you "elevation" moments.  For me, how about when Elliot hugs E.T. at the end, or in Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, when Steve Martin brings John Candy home with him, or in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind when (after both having their memories erased) the couple meet each other a second time and can't help but fall in love again.  Everyone has their own favorites.

So, my expectations are high for The Tree of Life.  Maybe too high...we'll see.